Intraoperative Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) integrates operative interventions (e.g., intracranial neurosurgical procedures) with MRI for immediate evaluation of cerebral interventions and resections. In conventional functional MRI-guided (fMRI) surgical procedures performed in an MR-operating room (MR-OR), fMRI is used for localizing specific functional areas (e.g., primary motor area or language area) and assessing the proximity to a lesion volume. Typically, neurosurgeons use the fMRI before a surgery to plan the trajectory of the operation, but the brain state might vary dynamically or the brain can shift before the actual surgery takes place, which makes that fMRI image inaccurate. Also, neurosurgeons often rely on patients to be awake during operations to providing behavior cues. It is beneficial to simultaneously monitor patients' cognitive state directly from functional images.
Accordingly, it is desired to provide a real-time fMRI guidance system that can show a brain activation map related to certain cognitive tasks in real time while also identifying regions of interests (ROIs) associated with specific cognitive or behavioral functions as well as locations that indicate patient pain, craving, attention, or other quantities driving the neuro-feedback process. Additionally, such a system should be capable of extracting quantitative measurements of brain state and simultaneously decoding patient characteristics in real time to allow brain response for a specific operational event (encoding models) to be predicted.